heating water for a single cup
First post here. I brew tea one cup at a time. If you do likewise, how do you heat your water, and what is your preferred method of brewing.
I have an electric kettle at home, and use that to brew by the cup (2-3 different teas at a time sometimes). At work, I have a Sunbeam Hot Shot at my desk. Heats 16 oz of water at a time. I generally use tea bags, especially at the office. For loose leafs here at home, I use bags, stainless steel brew baskets, or a silicone travel basket depending on the size of the leaf.
Ok how the heck are you talented enough to steep 2-3 teas at once?! You’re a rock star!:)
It’s pretty easy, actually. Line up your cups, choose teas that like a similar temperature. Place tea in cups, pour water, start timer for that cup. I have a tea timer from Teavana, the microwave’s timer, and the tea timer on my iPhone (which can actually time multiple cups itself). Stagger the start times by about 10 seconds so you have time to take out the tea before the next cup’s ready. I have lots of cups.
And I hate the feeling I get when the tea cup is empty and there’s not another one there for me. It’s similar to finding out Santa wasn’t real.
no matter the amount of water i heat the water in my breville electric kettle at home and use a hot water spigot on the water fountain at work.
at home i love my breville one-touch, but i also will use the gravity french press things (example teavana perfect steeper and adagio ingenutea), at work i use my kati cup with strainer
Echoing Breville’s awesomeness even though I don’t have it… there’s a min water level so you may need to heat more than one cup of water, but there’s a keep warm function so you don’t have to wait for the water to heat for your next cup :) You can also change the temp w/o having to remeasure water.
PINO and ChefChoice also have electric kettles you could set to a specific temps, but again they have min water requirements.
The ingenuiTEA is awesome for what I call “mindless” teas- teas that require boiling water. It is plastic though and I haven’t found a glass version yet.
I love my CDN tea thermometer/timer.
You could also train yourself to eyeball temps (I’m too OCD about parameters and HORRIBLE at eyeballing so I don’t.) heated on the stove in a pan based on bubble size, etc.
Tea kettle on the stove… it doesn’t bother me to leave the water in the kettle to reheat later. I usually eyeball temp, but sometimes use the thermometer if I’m feeling finicky. I don’t have a lot of variety, most of my teas use boiling water.
Yeah I firmly believe that how you heat water (no mater how much) has a lot to do w/ what kind you drink… and of course personality to a point. Do you find your eye balling to be pretty accurate?
For the most part, yeah. I usually just let it boil, turn it off and open the top, then come back to it when I think it’s cooled down enough. It’s a lot easier (when getting ready for work) than waiting for it to reach a certain temp as it’s heating… if that makes sense.
No it doesn’t, but that’s just because my brain doesn’t work like that lol:) I’m also slightly ADHD so I know I’d forget about it pretty much 100% of the time. Glad it works for you- I wish i was more like that sometimes.
Oh, trust me… I’ve forgotten it plenty of times. I’ve also forgotten I was brewing tea until hours later. My mind is slippery that way. Sometimes, I can tell you where I put something three weeks ago, who I was talking to when I did it, and what we were talking about… sometimes I can’t find something that was in my left hand less than 30 seconds ago.
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